Southern Perspectives on the Queer Movement

Description

A collection of essays by South Carolina activists on the development of the LGBTQ movement

In Southern Perspectives on the Queer Movement: Committed to Home, Sheila R. Morris has collected essays by South Carolinians who explore their gay identities and activism from the emergence of the HIV-AIDS pandemic to the realization of marriage equality in the state thirty years later. Each of the volume's nineteen essays addresses an aspect of gay life, from hesitant coming-out acts in earlier decades to the creation of grassroots organizations. All the contributors have taken public roles in the gay rights movement.

The diverse voices include a banker, a drag queen from a family of prominent Spartanburg Democrats, a marching minister who grew up along the Edisto River, a former Catholic priest and his tugboat dispatcher husband from Long Island, the owner of a feminist bookstore, a Hispanic American who interned for Republican strategist Lee Atwater, a philanthropist politician from Faith, North Carolina, and a straight attorney recognized as the "Mother of Pride" who became active in 1980, when she learned her son was gay.

Southern Perspectives on the Queer Movement challenges the conventional understanding of the LGBTQ movement in the United States in both place and time. Typically associated with pride marches and anti-AIDS activism on both the east and west coasts and rooted in the counterculture of the 1960s and "Stonewall Rebellion" in New York City, Southern variants of the queer liberation movement have found little room in public or scholarly memory. Confronting an aggressively hostile environment in the South, queer political organization was a late-comer to the region. But it was the very unfriendliness of Southern political soil that allowed a unique and, at times, progressive LGBTQ political community to form in South Carolina. The compelling Southern voices collected here for the first time add a missing piece to the complex puzzle of postwar queer activism in the United States.

Harlan Greene, author of the novels Why We Never Danced the Charleston, What the Dead Remember, and The German Officer's Boy, provides a foreword.

Contributors:
Jim Blanton
Candace Chellew-Hodge
Matt Chisling
Michael Haigler
Harriet Hancock
Deborah Hawkins
Dick Hubbard
Linda Ketner
Ed Madden and Bert Easter
Alvin McEwen
Sheila Morris
Pat Patterson
Jim and Warren Redman-Gress
Nekki Shutt
Tony Snell-Rodriquez
Carole Stoneking
Thomas A. Summers
Matt Tischler
Teresa Williams

Contributors:

Jim Blanton
Candace Chellew-Hodge
Matt Chisling
Michael Haigler
Harriet Hancock
Deborah Hawkins
Dick Hubbard
Linda Ketner
Ed Madden and Bert Easter
Alvin McEwen
Sheila Morris
Pat Patterson
Jim and Warren Redman-Gress
Nekki Shutt
Tony Snell-Rodriquez
Carole Stoneking
Thomas A. Summers
Matt Tischler
Teresa Williams

Sujets

• Gay Studies
• LGBTQ+ Studies
• Literary Criticism
• LGBTQ+
• The Cultural Creatives
• Color line (civil rights issue)
• Gay pride
• About Your Sexuality
• Black pride
• Gay Shame
• Gay literature
• Floyd Spence
• University of South Carolina
• LGBT rights by country or territory
• Queer Nation
• Queer studies
• Southern Baptist Convention
• Sexuality and gender identity-based cultures
• Stonewall riots
• Racial segregation
• Convention baptiste du Sud
• Anita Hill
• Université de Caroline du Sud
• Marche des fiertés
• Queer
• LGBT

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 20 décembre 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611178142
• Langue: English

Extrait

SOUTHERN PERSPECTIVES on the QUEER MOVEMENT
SOUTHERN PERSPECTIVES
on the
QUEER
MOVEMENT
COMMITTED TO HOME

EDITED BY SHEILA R. MORRIS
Foreword by Harlan Greene

THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA PRESS
2018 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/
ISBN 978-1-61117-813-5 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-61117-814-2 (ebook)
Front cover design by Brandi Lariscy Avant
Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable . Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concerns of dedicated individuals.
Martin Luther King, Jr. Stride toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story
CONTENTS

List of Illustrations
Foreword Harlan Greene
Preface
Acknowledgments
PROLOGUE
The Selection Process
JIM BLANTON
Dramatic Activist
CANDACE CHELLEW-HODGE
Reluctant Apostle
MATT CHISLING
A Gay Man for All Seasons
MICHAEL HAIGLER
A Prodigal Son Returns Home
HARRIET HANCOCK
Mother of Pride
DEBORAH HAWKINS
Community Anchor
DICK HUBBARD
Marching to a Different Drummer
LINDA KETNER
Finding Home without a Map
ED MADDEN and BERT EASTER
In Word, in Deed-Reflections on a Life in Activism
ALVIN MCEWEN
Black History Reconstruction
SHEILA MORRIS
Essayist with Humorist Tendencies
PAT PATTERSON and PATTI O FURNITURE
Born to Stand and Deliver
JIM and WARREN REDMAN-GRESS
New York Yankees in a Southerner s Court
NEKKI SHUTT
Gladiator
TONY SNELL-RODRIGUEZ
The Republican Who Came Out from the Cold
CAROLE STONEKING
Lesbian for a Lifetime
TOM SUMMERS
Walking for the Wounded
MATT TISCHLER
Type A Activist
TERESA WILLIAMS
Warrior Mother
Appendix
Contributors
ILLUSTRATIONS

Workshop Theatre playbill
List of demands
Candace Chellew-Hodge
Matt Chisling
Michael Haigler
Harriet Hancock with her son Greg
Harriet Hancock with award
Deborah Hawkins
Dick Hubbard
Linda Ketner
Linda Ketner
Ed Madden and Bert Easter
Alvin McEwen
Sheila Morris
Pat Patterson
Patti O Furniture
Jim and Warren Redman-Gress with their son, Cristopher
Nekki Shutt
Columbia mayor Bob Coble and Tony Snell-Rodriquez
Harriet Hancock with Tony Snell-Rodriquez
Carole Stoneking
Rev. Tom Summers
Matt Tischler
Teresa Williams with her son, Drew James
FOREWORD

South Carolina is so gay!
Although a statement like that may not turn heads today (and may even be appropriate with the publication of this book), that was certainly not the case in 2008. When those same words (surrounded by pink triangles) appeared on travel posters that year, they sparked a backlash of denial and controversy. The posters were part of an advertising campaign staged during London s Pride Festival to promote gay and gay-friendly tourism to such American cities as Atlanta, Boston, Las Vegas, Washington, DC, and New Orleans. South Carolina, being dependent on tourism and proud of its reputation for hospitality, petitioned to be part of the campaign and committed a few thousand dollars to be included in the advertisements.
But when word got back to Columbia, an embarrassing kerfuffle ensued. That the great state of South Carolina could be gay or appear to be supportive of gay rights, or even welcome those who were gay (who might fork over some of the $40 billion a year that supports the tourism industry) was apparently not in line with official policy. (South Carolina, 1970s tourist posters had proclaimed, looked a lot like a foreign country; in this instance it did, but an unfriendly and unenlightened one, unfortunately.) Officials took a stand; our reputation was at stake. Although Oscar Wilde had visited South Carolina in the 1880s, the love that dared not speak its name (his tragic phrase) was not going to be allowed even to whisper a hint of its being here-with official sanction at least. Someone was fired, and there was much grandstanding by those proud to have turned away the money of gay tourists.
Embarrassed for the home they loved and taking exception to its decision, the state s gay men and lesbians stepped in with an offer to defray the cost the state refused to pay the advertisers and thus win a victory for openness, honesty, and visibility. That was a great day to be gay in South Carolina; and since then, with the passing of so many legal and social milestones, those happy moments have come more frequently. It s an about-face that many of the men and women whose stories are collected here never thought they d witness but nevertheless helped achieve. And so the publication of their stories is yet another good day for the state, a cause to celebrate.
But before we break into applause and cheers, it might be good to pause to take a look at how we got here, and how long it took.
That our state has had an exceptional history no one can deny, although some may want to. Historians have long confirmed South Carolina s consistent exceptionalism with regard to major American social trends. This is, after all, the state that restricted most white males from voting directly in national elections in the early nineteenth century; that championed the positive good of African slavery; that outlawed divorce on any grounds until 1950; that did not allow women to serve on juries until the 1960s; that prohibited men and women convicted of sodomy from voting until 1970. For so much of the state s history, being an exception when it comes to recognizing human rights has been the rule.
Now, a decade and a half into the twenty-first century, the landscape has altered drastically. Vast numbers of tax-paying citizens, ignored and legislated into powerlessness, have, by their own demands and actions, gained entry into spheres long denied them. One of the most exclusive of these spheres, more so than those of politics, social acceptance, or equal rights, is that of the past. The hallowed precincts of our history have long functioned as a snobby club, with only a certain few-mostly white males of a particular orientation and class-allowed in or deemed worthy of entry.
The decline of that exclusivity is seen today. As debates rage over the fate of monuments to debunked racists and segregationists in squares and parks, new monuments and plaques are appearing to acknowledge the actions and lives of women and citizens of African descent. While it was common well into the twentieth century for textbooks and tourist sites to leave out the contributions, voluntary or not, heroic or forced, of African Americans; today, with the proliferation of books on slavery, segregation and civil rights and slews of biographies and social commentaries, it is no longer possible to do that. In a similar manner, the gender line, along with the color line, has been broken.
Women play prominent roles in government; they have stepped down from metaphoric pedestals and ascended granite ones, as they too have been written back into our state s history. Those who stood above the crowd and went against popular opinion to achieve these things-the men and women ahead of their times who first felt the population s vengeance-now have vindication: Robert Smalls, castigated as a slave who stole a Confederate ship and denounced as a Reconstruction politician, is now revered as a hero; J. Waties Waring, the segregationist who saw the light and became the first judge to rule from the federal bench that separate but equal is per se inequality, has gotten a building named after him and a statue; and after nearly two centuries of silence, the Grimk sisters, who lobbied both for white and black as well as male and female equality, have received a memorial in their native Charleston. (One wonders what lines those sisters would have crossed, what marches they would have joined, and what battles they would have staged had they seen the obstacles their black lesbian great-niece, Angelina Weld Grimk , faced in the twentieth century.) While I know of no statues raised to gay South Carolinians yet, gay men and women are now in print and quite visible, and we, like blacks and women, have been admitted into the larger South Carolina family. Laws protect us (not quite enough yet) and society is welcoming, but still there is one gap left-that same inclusion into the past. Although this book helps (going all the way back to the 1980s), the filling in of the gaps of our past may be the hardest hurdle for us to clear.
Why bother, one might ask. Isn t the past passed? Perhaps. Or not. Since South Carolina mines the past and thinks of it as a natural resource of sorts, we need to be seen in that vein. And since South Carolinians, in particular, are said to profit from the past (which we do in one way or another, but unfortunately more often in one way, dollars and cents, than the other-making sense of our cultural legacy), we need to be included in it, too. George Orwell s dictum that those who control the past control the future and its reverse, that those who control the future control the past, can be considered relevant here.
Other minorities have learned the necessity of inclusion and of being written into the state s history. With study, acumen, and perusing of archives and libraries, scholars have mined sources th